Backup is a necessary practice in all companies. The data backup market is lucrative and has attracted many vendors. Each vendor competes with the other vendors to switch customers to their backup systems by promising reliability, features, and ease-of-use. Data backup lends itself to continuous improvement and opportunity for new vendors. Unfortunately, problems arise once customers decide to switch backup systems. Regulatory or compliance reasons force customers to retain old backups (created with the previous vendor's systems) for a period of years. Although customers retain the right to use the old software and use it to restore old backups when called upon, this decision increases the cost of having to maintain the old vendor's system and retain skills associated with the old system. Further, the customer must manage the complexity of using two or more vendor systems, thus limiting operational streamlining that would result from employing a single vendor solution. Currently, there is no good way of integrating backup systems.